Pokemon Reborn E18 speedrun in 9h 17m (in-game timer)

[dondon151]

'Sup all,

 

As a preface, this run in a sense has been 5 years in the making. Going through my post history, I first played Reborn in 2014 and started writing a speedrun route soon after completing the game. I had a long hiatus due to losing interest and new episode releases messing up the route. With the main story nearing completion and @Arkadius making a competing speedrun route, I decided to rewrite my route from scratch. This ended up taking much longer than I expected. Turns out Reborn is a hard game!

 

Some key differences. Arkadius played the game with native Alt speedup, which cuts the amount of real time needed to play the game (RTA) but increases the in-game timer (IGT) due to imprecise movements. The degree to which Alt speeds up the game depends on your computer's processing power, and my computer does not have a good processor. My route does not use Alt speedup at all. As such, our times are not directly comparable. Arkadius's final RTA was 6h 26m, corresponding to an IGT of ~14h 40m. Even accounting for IGT inflation due to imprecise movements, I believe that my route is faster. All of the earlygame battles are significantly faster in this route, and fewer Pokemon are trained for the lategame. This route does not do any optional battles aside from a couple of low level trainers in Lower Peridot Ward at the beginning of the game. There is less time spent using TMs due to using a dedicated TMX slave for the Water type TMXs.

 

Both routes select Torchic as starter and get the male Espurr in Lower Peridot Ward. Beyond that, the routes are entirely different. This route only levels up Blaziken and Diggersby to the lategame (instead of Blaziken, Ampharos, Sharpedo, and Nidoqueen). It adds a Cottonee to the team before Charlotte. The full route can be viewed here.

 

Here is the final team at the end of E18:

 

Splits:

Spoiler

 

Thoughts / ranting:

 

Worst fights: Aster + Eclipse 4, Aster + Eclipse 2, Fiore Gauntlet, Aya, Bennett 1 / Serra

 

I think Arkadius also considered Aster + Eclipse 4 to be one of the worst fights in his speedrun. Bulldoze spam with dual screens is very hard for this team comp to deal with. Aya is also a shitty partner. I think the worst thing is when her Venusaur uses Nature Power > Discharge in the Short-Circuit Field and paralyzes Blaziken or gets a high damage roll. Before I incorporated an X Sp Def into that fight, Aya was probably the #1 reason for resets.

 

Aster + Eclipse 2 puts you in a field that tickles Blaziken half the time and murders Blaziken the other half, with no good way to mitigate the field in a speedrun. Victoria's Torracat randomly has Intimidate even though it always has Intimidate in her battle right after. The rest of her team is trash too. Part of this is my fault because I am trying to train Espurr in this battle too.

 

Fiore Gauntlet is hard for everyone. Tag battles are very hard to route for because there's a lot of randomness. Fern + Blake is easy if Hippowdon uses Yawn. Solaris + John is the really bad fight. I think including an X Sp Def will probably help, but I've spent literally days playing this fight over and over. I've lost a ton of runs to Florinia's Tropius using Fly and leaving Blaziken to face down 2 enemies by itself. Why can't she have any other Pokemon?

 

Aya is iffy just because Blaziken has to dodge Sludge Wave's status for 2 turns and hit 2 Blaze Kicks. It's nowhere near as bad as the other fights. Bennett 1 and Serra are on a bullshit field and even with Misty Terrain strats, their Pokemon are holding Bright Powder and you can still miss anyway. There's no way to increase accuracy at this point in the game - no Gravity, no Hone Claws, no X Accuracy, no Wide / Zoom Lens, no Aerial Ace, and Synthetic Seed only boosts Evasion and not Accuracy.

 

Suggestions:

 

@andracass pointed out in Arkadius's thread that she's open to suggestions for incorporating solutions to speedrun timing in E19. In my opinion, unless it's proven that IGT is inaccurate, I don't see the need for a frame counter. Displaying seconds on the in-game timer is probably sufficient, if this is feasible. As it stands, a full E18 speedrun would probably be around 10 hours RTA. This is barely viable for a single segment run. I know that Pokemon Essentials is the limiting factor, but if basic game functions can be sped up, that would significantly increase the viability of Reborn as a single segment speedrun. Things such as menu navigation and text displays in-battle are probably the slowest parts of the game. Honestly, if in-battle messages went as fast as overworld messages (by holding X), it can probably cut over 1 hour out of the run.

 

Beyond that, I have a handful of suggestions to the game itself that would reduce RNG in the run (I don't expect them to be implemented but it's worth bringing up nonetheless):

- I remember at some point that the Espurr in LPW was always an Espurr. Finding a Minccino here kills the run. I don't see why the Espurr can't be guaranteed and Minccino moved to a separate event.

- There are a lot of major battles in the earlygame with random enemy abilities. The Victoria example vs. Aster + Eclipse 2 is the most impactful one. Intimidate Torracat makes the battle less random; Blaze Torracat is useless.

- Please please please take away Nature Power from Aya's Venusaur and Fly from Florinia's Tropius when they're partner NPCs. Nature Power especially.

- 15% encounter rates for Bunnelby and Cottonee in Beryl Cave and Route 4 are workable, though RNG has a large effect on time with these low encounter rates.

 

Anyway. Props to Ame and the dev team for making a game that's intensely difficult to break. Special thanks to @Paperblade for his boss stats spreadsheet. Tagging @bloo123 for his involvement in route improvements. Thanks to Arkadius as well for creating a competing route and, in a way, influencing me to come back to this game.

[andracass]

hi. am gril. plz.

we're working on performance improvements. text speed is on the list.

[Arkadius]

Amazing! Really cool to another complete route, especially one that is different in a major way. 
I will go over it in more detail later. Very interesting to see Diggersby. I can see how having only two main pokemon could be/would be faster than having 4 main pokemon. I think @bloo123 made a list sometime of how much each main pokemon contributed to the route and Blaziken was far at the top followed by I believe Nidoqueen, Sharpedo and Ampharos. 

 

Also I see this route was done for episode 18-1 and not episode 18-2. Episode 18-2 has the massive AI update as well as other notable changes to trainers pokemon, hold items etc. One of the changes made is for the fiore gauntlet, Florinia has a tangrowth instead of the Tropius. 

 

@bloo123 and I have been working and refining the route used in the 6h 26m version. He came up with a ton of new ideas, some of which I also see in your route, like Misty terrain Meowstic + amplified Rock and teleport Natu. 

The last week or so we've been trying to deal with the 18-2 update and the new AI, which has proven a bit of a challenge in some areas but made other fights easier or at least more logical and therefor more predictable. 

 

The speedup/not speedup will always be a thing I think. I don't really see a solution for it. If you want the fastest RTA time, enable it. If you want more comparable runs, disable it. This should be something the community should decide. You could very simple make 2 categories, with and without speedup. I don't like forcing people to play a certain way. so this works I suppose.

 

[andracass]

another thing worth noting is that pokemon whose sets used low speed movesets have gotten a big buff with the 32 IV, which gives them 31 in everything except speed

this probably makes the biggest difference for radomus in particular

[bloo123]

hey dude really cool run and ideas you brought up, i'll give it a look see when i have more time. that said me and arkadius are playing and rerouting on 18.2 since the aiupdate amongst other things like the fast travel forfeit feature really do make a lot of changes to the current run. here's my run on 18.1, unfortunately my pc isn't the strongest and has a lot of overworld lag hence the bad time but it showcases all the new (or should i say old) strats that i employ. also for future reference it would be great if you recorded a run since i would have loved to see it in its entirety but major props on creating your own original route and putting your own spin on things! im currently at charlotte rn for 18.2 but so far things seem a lot better, granted i did have to get creative with a lot of things. hit us up on discord if you wanna chat about anything 

 

 

[dondon151]

12 hours ago, Arkadius said:

Also I see this route was done for episode 18-1 and not episode 18-2. Episode 18-2 has the massive AI update as well as other notable changes to trainers pokemon, hold items etc. One of the changes made is for the fiore gauntlet, Florinia has a tangrowth instead of the Tropius. 

Yeah tbh the 18.2 update completely flew under my radar and I didn't even know that it was released until a day after posting this thread, LOL. There are a couple of reliability improvements that I was going to include in the run anyway so I was planning to do another test run, this time with Adamant Blaze Torchic and 0 Spe IV Diggersby. I'm also not sure how likely the 18.2 AI is going to represent the "final" version, as users have pointed out problems with it already.

 

@bloo123 @Arkadius can you DM me your Discord tags, please and thank you.

[Arkadius]

For sure, find me on discord under Arkadius500#2539. I'm in the Reborn discord.

For the 18-2 speedrun, some general observations: the AI prefers to use status moves when on high/full HP. They also prefer priority moves when they're being outsped by you or if there's nothing else they can do. There are also a lot more switches. You can force a switch usually by bringing a pokemon down to -2 in a stat. Certain gym leaders have been buffed, some pokemon have items like focus sash. In other battles, pokemon have been changed or added. This seems mostly to be the case for Team Meteor fights. 

 

 

[bloo123]

i go by ~(^.^)~#3568 and i'm in the reborn server as well. just to make sure, is your run segmented or is it done all in one go? i skimmed over your notes and its pretty detailed, demanding and balls to the wall risky and rng reliant for that matter, so i'm unsure on how consistent some of your routing is. however, since you play without speedup i figured a non-segmented run might be less intense to execute. still wanted to confirm what kind of run yours was so i can make sense of some of the times you got on each split. also if it's any consolation, partner ai has also been buffed quite a bit so a lot less can go wrong in certain tag battle fights and florinia's team in particular for fiore has been buffed.

[dondon151]

The splits are segmented but the route should be RTA-able. Obviously there are some potential resets in some fights (which the route says to save beforehand) but I would say the only bad fights are Aster + Eclipse 4 and Solaris + John.

 

I have played through the route twice on E18.1, with different natures of Blaziken, and generally I have been using low IVs on the essential Pokemon. The route has not been very RNG dependent. So actually the biggest question mark is that I don't know how higher IVs affect the strats. This is all thrown out the window for E18.2 anyway because there are some significant differences in the battles.

[Amethyst]

hey, glad to see you're back at it! sorry for kind of immediately undercutting your new route with a surprise release. whoops.

 

i've gone ahead and removed nature power from that venusaur; also guaranteed intimidate on torracat. frankly the missing ability in that fight looks like an oversight anyway. 

 

battle speed will also be the death of me.

 

 

[Lostelle]

incredible! nice to see you make a return and finally finish this. well done!